Posted on 03/29/2009 10:22:41 AM PDT by billorites
THE inglorious pun! Dryden called it the “lowest and most groveling kind of wit.” To Ambrose Bierce it was a “form of wit to which wise men stoop and fools aspire.” Universal experience confirms the adage that puns don’t make us laugh, but groan. It is said that Caligula ordered an actor to be roasted alive for a bad pun. (Some believe he was inclined to extremes.)
Addison defined the pun as a “conceit arising from the use of two words that agree in the sound, but differ in the sense.” “Energizer Bunny Arrested! Charged with Battery.” No laugh? Q.E.D.
Puns are the feeblest species of humor because they are ephemeral: whatever comic force they possess never outlasts the split second it takes to resolve the semantic confusion. Most resemble mathematical formulas: clever, perhaps, but hardly occasion for knee-slapping. The worst smack of tawdriness, even indecency, which is why puns, like off-color jokes, are often followed by apologies. Odds are that a restaurant with a punning name — Snacks Fifth Avenue, General Custard’s Last Stand — hasn’t acquired its first Michelin star.
How have the great comic writers regarded puns? Jane Austen puns once, in “Mansfield Park,” and it serves to impeach the moral character of the offender. Mark Twain’s first book, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” enamored reviewers with its punlessness. There are “no contortions of words,” said a London paper. “His fun is entirely dependent upon the inherent humor in his writings.” The 20th century’s finest humorist, P. G. Wodehouse, doesn’t use them.
Shakespeare, however, does. Many are bawdy: puns operate, after all, on double entendre. Yet the poet is guilty less of punning than wordplay, which Elizabethan taste considered more a sign of literary refinement than humor; hence “puns” in seemingly inappropriate places,
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I like puns.
Mark Steyn, my favorite writer of the moment, is a serial offender, and very funny, IMHO.
This, OTOH, is a JOKE.
I read that while eating a Johnsonville sausage, it was the wurst of punishments.
You mean like
I am curious how the New York Times reconciles its masthead logo, "All The News That's Fit to Print," in today's world.
I had an idea for a low-carb hot dog stand called “No Bun Intended.”
So do I. A good pun is its own reword.
Puns are a sign of high intelligence. They take a good knowledge of language added to a large degree of wit with a huge dose of self confidence that a general audience won't see the pun as witty as a select few.
Actually that’s , “All the news that fits, we print.”.
That almost looks like the Rev. Pun Kum Soon with some formerly dead guy....
That is very clever and if you will excuse the pun, very fitting.
These guys have obviously never seen your posts & threads
These guys have obviously never seen your posts & threads
I read a post lately where an islamic village burned a young girl to death for fooling around with a young man.
It takes a village to braise a child.
oooh, I’m definitely saving those... by which I mean, steal ‘em... ;’)
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